Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Angel Crawford has buried her loser past and is cruising along in undead high gear—that is, until a murder-by-decapitation sends her on a hazardous detour. As Angel hunts for the killer, she uncovers a scheme that would expose zombies to the public and destroy the life she’s built, and she’s determined not to rest until she finds out who’s behind it.

Soon she’s neck-deep in lies, redneck intrigue, zombie hunters, and rot-sniffing cadaver dogs. It’s up to her to unravel the truth and snuff out the conspiracy before the existence of zombies makes headline news and she’s outed as a monster.

But Angel hasn’t quite escaped the pill-popping ghosts of her past—not with an illicit zombie pharmaceutical at her fingertips. Good thing she’s absolutely sure she can handle the drug’s unpredictable side effects and still take down the bad guys…or maybe she’s only one bad choice away from being dead meat—for real this time.

Angel knows a thing or two about kicking ass, but now the ass she needs to kick might be her own.

REVIEW

I was hesitant to read Diana Rowland’s
White Trash Zombie series. They were shelved in the romance section, the covers
didn’t look like a book I’d want to read, and I’m not the biggest zombie fan.

Yet I
kept hearing really great things about this series. In fact, a number of
authors who I love, including Kevin Hearne, kept raving about the series,
saying fans of urban fantasy were missing out if they weren’t reading it.

So I was
in need of a book one day so I picked it up the first in the series, My Life as
a White Trash Zombie.

And let
me tell you Diana Rowland sure can write.

First off
let me say that there is no reason this series should be filed under romance.
It is straight urban fantasy. It’s told from a unique perspective, that of a
drug addict, unemployed, high school drop out, who happens to find herself with
the troubling misfortune of having just become as a zombie.

The
series is filled with tons of action, great humor, and the perfect amount of
sass and zest in the dialogue to keep the story flowing and the reader hooked.

So it was
no surprise that I soon picked up each successive book in the series until I
was caught up.

Which
brings us to White Trash Zombie Gone Wild.

Well
besides the cover (which I’m still not a fan of) and the title, I absolutely
loved it. Rowland picks up with one of the troubling problems introduced in the
previous book in the series, what happens when a recovering drug addict does
drugs again. Gone Wild picks up with the protagonist Angel addicted to the
zombie battle drug B-12. The downside to the drug though is that it increases
the users reliance on brains, and that’s just the beginning. With a number of
other side effects, readers are introduced to the shame and panic filled world
of a drug addict. Rowland does this beautifully, highlighting the low notes and
the powerlessness of the cravings, while at the same time not letting it
detract from the action or the story itself.

While
I highly recommend reading the first books in the series before jumping into
the fifth installment of this series, I fully support picking up the White
Trash Zombie series. As mentioned before the protagonist is fun, likable, and
full of zingy one liners, there is a fantastic amount of action in each
installment of the series, and each book moves fast, so that readers will
barely have picked it before they have put it down for the next in the series.
All in all I just hope that readers don’t fall into the mistake that I did,
passing on such a fun and entertaining series for so long because of my distain
for a books cover and shelving location. If you’re a fan of urban fantasy or
kick butt characters then give this a try.